At the University of California at Santa Barbara, “Black Studies faculty plan ‘day of interruption’ to protest protections for Jews,” reports The College Fix. The university’s “Black Studies Department has organized a “day of interruption” for March 7 and subsequent ‘work slowdowns’ to protest steps administrators recently took to support Jewish students” after antisemitic protests and threats on campus:
Campus leaders last week closed the Multicultural Center and suspended its social media accounts after pro-Palestinian students occupied the venue and hung a parade of antisemitic posters…The student government president, who is Jewish, was also called out and threatened by name…Campus leaders temporarily closed the Multicultural Center in response, prompting outrage from Black Studies faculty, who released a statement a few days later calling for the “day of interruption.”
The professors called the MCC closure a “displacement” of students of color, and also cite proposed policies that would allow administrators to have editorial control of UCSB departmental websites, a proposal to allow police on campus for major events, and leaders’ refusal to condemn Israel. All this amounts to a “threat to BIPOC, queer, and trans students’, staff’s, and faculty’s ability to engage in free and public intellectual activity.”
The attacks on Jewish students on campus have prompted tension and concern….Noah Weiss, a senior who is an environmental studies major and a strong supporter of Israel, said “Jewish students have to think before they go places.”
“They’re anxious about voicing political views. A Jewish student shouldn’t feel afraid to wear a star of David or a dog tag necklace to free the hostages…The most serious concern is that many Jewish students are now afraid of their professors,” Weiss said. “Jewish students are isolated….We’re pretty liberal, especially about civil rights. But no one is supporting us.”
“Jewish students are furious with the administration,” Weiss said. “They’re concerned for their safety. [Professors and peers have] painted Jewish students … as genocidal colonizers, and terrorists.”
At San Francisco State University, left-wing students offered money to kill Jews.
Earlier, The College Fix reported on how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) staff harbor high levels of antisemitism.
Harvard told Jews to “hide” their menorah at night during Hanukkah.
In a recent poll, most young adults surveyed said they believed “Jews as a class are oppressors.”
As a father of a student in a progressive school district noted, “Given what my daughter was taught in school (e.g., reading leftist Ibram Kendi’s book), it’s sadly predictable that many her age view Jews as oppressors. Kendi teaches that all ethnic disparities” in achievement “are due to discrimination. Jews are statistically ‘overrepresented’ in many fields” that pay well, like law and medicine.
Kendi is very influential among progressives. The New York Times touted Kendi’s axiom that “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” If someone believes all ethnic disparities in outcomes are due to discrimination, as Kendi does, then they will naturally be suspicious of Jewish “overrepresentation” in law, medicine, and other lucrative fields. Antisemites such as the Nazis have long claimed Jews were unusually successful because they were clannish and discriminated in favor of fellow Jews. Never mind that Jewish success in these fields is due to merit and hard work, not discrimination in their favor. Ivy League universities and many major law firms used to discriminate specifically against Jews. Yet Jews managed to become statistically “overrepresented” in fields like law even at a time when discrimination against Jews was more common than it is today.
Kendi’s claim that all racial disparities are due to racism is wrong. Unequal racial outcomes exist everywhere in society and the world, usually for reasons unrelated to racism, as the black economist Thomas Sowell chronicles in his book Discrimination and Disparities.
The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist is that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book. Kendi has been described by progressive publications as a leading “critical race theorist.”
“To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says Kendi’s best-seller, How to Be An Antiracist. That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate.
The progressive Arlington County schools have students read books by critical race theorists such as Ibram Kendi. Arlington distributed hundreds of copies of Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students at Wakefield High School. The book contains many errors and celebrates a Marxist anti-Semite. It also peddles conspiracy theories and is dismissive about Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. At Arlington’s Washington-Liberty High School, most students in 9th grade English were assigned to read either Stamped or a much longer book that would require more work to read. Virtually all students chose to read Stamped as a result.
Under Democratic governor Ralph Northam, Virginia’s official “Roadmap to Equity” published by its Department of Education in 2020 thanked critical race theorist “Dr. Ibram X. Kendi” in its acknowledgments section, as having “informed the development of the EdEquityVA Framework.” Kendi says he was “inspired by critical race theory,” and that he cannot “imagine a pathway to” his teachings “that does not engage CRT.” Virginia’s largest school system, the progressive Fairfax County Public Schools, encouraged teachers to apply critical race theory. The Washington Times reported that a “slide presentation” in 2021 “instructed social studies teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools that ‘critical race theory is a frame’ for their work.” Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, said that critical race theory is deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about … embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.”
Colleges have allowed masked pro-Hamas rallies even in states like Virginia, which has a law banning public mask-wearing except for Halloween and health reasons, even though colleges would never tolerate mask-wearing right-wing protesters. With their identities hidden, these mask-wearing pro-Hamas protesters are emboldened to commit acts of vandalism and to physically threaten classmates they view as “Zionist.”
This ideological favoritism by colleges in favor of such protesters violates Supreme Court rulings such as Police Department v. Mosley (1972), which said pro-union protesters couldn’t be allowed to picket if other groups weren’t allowed to picket. The Virginia Court of Appeals has upheld Virginia’s mask ban, but left-wing prosecutors in college towns won’t enforce it against pro-Hamas protesters. Even though Code of Virginia § 18.2-422 clearly states, “It shall be unlawful for any person over 16 years of age to, with the intent to conceal his identity, wear any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, to be or appear in any public place…However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes….”
As law professor David Bernstein observes, “the biggest problem with how many campuses are handling pro-Hamas protests right now is not a failure to prohibit ‘hate speech,’” — which should not be banned on college campuses — “but a failure to enforce existing, content-neutral rules” against misbehavior like going into classrooms to disrupt class with noisy protests that make it impossible to hear what the professor is saying. As history professor KC Johnson notes, “recent disruptive anti-Israel protests –students with bullhorns interrupting classes, etc)–were organized by unrecognized student groups. They’re ‘technically not permitted to stage on-campus demonstrations,’” because of their unrecognized status. So “Why hasn’t Harvard enforced its rules?”
